Many corporations have a wide-area network or other form of network use that typically may carry at least two types of traffic: urgent traffic and traffic that can typically be delayed by some amount of time. Such delays might range from between a few minutes to several hours. Examples of delayable traffic includes periodic archiving of data and replicating data between diverse locations to manage business, for example, business continuity in case of catastrophic events. In many corporations, such delayable traffic might be scheduled away from peaks of urgent traffic to reduce total bandwidth capacity needed. This is because capital expenses as well as some other types of operating expenses in running or using a network tend to increase with an increase in total bandwidth capacity. Traffic shaping to reduce capacity is one approach when different types of traffic are readily distinguishable. Even then, however, capacity reduction might be negligible if urgent traffic is fairly uniform in time. In practice, urgent traffic is typically not uniform in time, peaking during some times and reaching low levels at other periods during a day or night. In theory, producers of delayable traffic then might realize this and attempt to schedule their traffic activities to avoid the peak usage by urgent traffic. Such scheduling discipline rarely materializes in large enterprises. This is also because, in some environments, while such peak times may be determinable, in other environments, such peak times are more random.
In response, some approaches to managing traffic are based on classes of service, such as might be seen in tag switching protocols, for example, such as described in Request for Comments (RFC) 2105, entitled “Cisco Systems' Tag Switching Architecture Overview,” available through the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Similar proposals involve tagging each type of traffic in the packet headers so that various network routers, or the like, can manage the packets. For example, all types of network traffic may enter a network virtually uncontrolled. When the traffic is received at a router, gateway, or other network routing device within the network, the network device prioritizes some packets over others, based on the tags, storing lower prioritized packets temporarily. Since network routing devices typically do not have large storage capacities, such schemes cannot typically intentionally delay traffic as long as might be required to achieve a determined significant bandwidth utilization. Thus, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.